Latte Trouble

Six

I’d met Lottie about a year before, when I’d first returned to managing the Blend after a decade of suburban single motherhood. Madame had arrived one afternoon with Lottie, the two chatting and laughing as they breezed through the coffeehouse door.

“Clare, dear, I’d like you to meet an old friend and a former light of the fashion world,” Madame had chirped.

I shook Lottie’s hand. “Model?” I asked since, at over fifty, Lottie appeared tall and slim enough to have been one, and with her bold scarlet-dyed hair she obviously didn’t mind attention.

“Model? Clare, surely you jest!” Madame chided. “You don’t recall Lottie Harmon accessories? Her brand name was magic.”

“Was being the key word,” said Lottie with a laugh. “Once upon a time, back in the early 1980s.”

I thought Lottie’s comment was funny and self-deprecating, but her laugh made me cringe slightly. It didn’t sound as tossed off as the remark—in fact, it sound strained, high-pitched, forced.

“Lottie was the creator of Spangles,” Madame reminded me. “You must remember some of those popular pieces like the Spangle tie-bar? She sold millions.”

I nodded vigorously as my mind raced back over twenty years to big hair, shoulder pads, skinny neckties, Flashdance legwarmers, and New Wave music. “Lottie Harmon Spangles! Of course!”

Spangles jewelry had been a fashion trend used by every glam rocker and drooling fan. David Bowie, Prince, Annie Lennox, Madonna—all of them wore Lottie’s Spangles. American magazines did glossy spreads of her line and famous European ads posed models wearing nothing but Lottie’s jewelry. Then came the grunge movement, and that was that. Another designer might have tried changing with the times, maybe stuck around to create bling-bling for rap artists, but Lottie Harmon had simply dropped out of the fashion scene.

“Pleased to meet you, Clare,” said Lottie. She smiled, then turned back to Madame. “But where is that husband of yours? Pierre? And your son? The last time I saw Matteo he was barely out of college….”

“Well, I’m very sorry to say that Pierre passed away, but my son is the Blend’s coffee buyer now, so, of course, he’s always jetting off to heaven knows where…” Madame’s voice trailed off as she led Lottie to a cozy table by the fireplace.

My former mother-in-law had later informed me that Lottie had come back to New York City to reside in Greenwich Village once again after twenty-five years of living overseas. She’d made it a point to look up Madame within a month of her return to America.

Lottie stopped by the coffeehouse at least once a week after that first meeting. Like Madame, I found her to be a person whose energy and enthusiasm belied her age. She wore her scarlet hair loose and long, and her striking deep blue eyes always seemed to be examining the subtlest color or shape of things. She acted as though she were hungry to hear about the latest trends of popular culture, which seemed a bit strange to me, considering her sudden drop from the center of its spotlight so many years before. Nevertheless, she would routinely arrive with an armload of European and American fashion magazines, pile them on a table and spend hours pouring through their pages, all the while casually engaging my staff or the customers in wide-ranging discussions about fashion, film, music, or current events.

It was during one of her visits to the Blend that the formerly “defunct” designer seized on the simple but brilliant idea that would resurrect her fashion career.

“What a color!” Lottie had exclaimed that Friday as she sat beside one of our regular customers. “That looks absolutely delicious. What are you drinking, darling?”

Rena Garcia, a petite Latina with shoulder-length dark curls, full, cocoa-painted lips and laughing dark eyes, tipped her cup in Lottie’s direction. “It’s a caramel-chocolate latte. I felt the need for some comfort today—and the Blend’s the only coffeehouse around here that makes these.”

The latte in question was a Village Blend specialty. Because of the extra prep time involved in making the homemade syrup, I placed it on our menu only Fridays through Sundays. The drink had been popular to begin with, but it was lately improved by Tucker Burton’s addition of whipped cream with a chocolate-covered coffee bean placed atop it. Since Tucker’s tinkering, the drink had become even more popular. Everyone who tried it loved it and came back for more.

“I’ll have one of those myself,” Lottie declared.

It was a happy coincidence that Rena had been there at all. The savvy, outspoken marketing professional, who was barely out of her twenties, had been fired the day before from her high-powered job at the nearby Satay and Satay Advertising Agency. She was only in the neighborhood to “clean out her desk and say good-bye to everyone,” which included the staff at the Blend.

“Stay awhile and let’s enjoy our lattes,” Lottie insisted after hearing this.

When I set a fresh caramel-chocolate latte in front of her, Lottie seemed transfixed by the hot liquid, the threads of our own homemade chocolate-infused caramel syrup crisscrossing the whipped cream, the single chocolate-covered coffee bean sitting atop the cloud.

“Now that is delightful,” said Lottie.

Rena regarded her. “But you haven’t even tried it yet.”

Lottie twirled her finger above the drink. “The white of the whipped cream is the perfect foil for that beautiful caramel-chocolate color of the syrup and the rich brown of the bean.”

“Excuse me?” said Rena.

“It’s a sophisticated color, too,” continued Lottie. “Not like those bubble-gum pinks I’ve seen far too much of. These colors are classic, not trendy. Subtle, mature, reassuring…colors that dispel the chill of the autumn day. What was the word you used—”

Rena laughed. “Comfort. It’s a comfort drink.”

Overhearing them from behind the counter, I jumped in. “Like comfort food, right? Chocolate chip cookies or apple pie or mashed potatoes and meatloaf.”

Lottie nodded, tapping her chin with her finger, even more intrigued. “And all of those foods are part of the same palette—creams, tans, browns. Look, Rena. See how, as you drink it, the caramel-chocolate swirls in the latte froth…see how it would highlight the weave in your sweater.”

“It would look good on me as a brooch, then,” said Rena, half-jokingly. “Better that than spilled on my sweater. Actually, I haven’t found any jewelry that doesn’t look tacky on me. Everything’s either blah or trying too hard to be faux antique or like some thrift shop rhinestone retro ‘find’ when it obviously isn’t.”

Lottie’s brow was still wrinkled in thought, then she nodded. “You’re right, Rena. It would look good as a brooch…in fact, it would look fabulous!” Lottie instantly grabbed a dozen napkins and borrowed a pen from me. As she began to sketch, a man stepped up to the coffee bar from a nearby table to join their conversation.

Tad Benedict, a thirty-something, self-employed investment banker, was working some personal stock trades on his laptop computer when he’d overheard the women. It was soon fairly clear that Tad was more interested in Rena Garcia than the unique hue of her beverage, but all three were cordial to each other.

“You said you’d been fired?” Tad asked Rena. “But why would they get rid of someone like you? Don’t they need good people over at S and S anymore?”

Rena tossed her dark curls and laughed. “My boss got rid of me because I’m smarter than her,” she replied. “I came up with ideas she took, and when I started making noise about a promotion, a raise, or some sort of recognition, she trumped up complaints about my performance. That uptight vampire bitch of a manager only has a job because she’s bled young assistants dry one after another then tossed them aside when she felt threatened.”

“I’m really sorry,” said Tad, “but you know that’s a very old story in this town…and probably a lot of other ones too, so don’t feel bad.”

Rena sighed and shook her head. “Wish I could say I don’t but I do.”

“You’re better off. Look, you’ve just met me, haven’t you? And I know some guys on Wall Street who might be looking for someone like you.”

Her full lips smiled and she met his gaze. “Like you, maybe?”

As the afternoon wore on, the trio talked while they consumed gallons of coffee and a dozen fresh-baked pastries. As the shadows began to lengthen, Rena looked up in surprise, then glanced at her watch. “I should go,” she announced. “I still have to clean out my office and I don’t want some security guard hovering over me while I do it, which is exactly what will happen if I try to enter the building after five o’clock.”

“Forget about that and take a look at this instead,” said Lottie. She held out the napkin. On it, she’d drawn a brooch. Text and arrows indicated the colors she’d chosen—colors that mimicked the hue of the Blend’s caramel-chocolate latte.

“It’s large, but not garish,” Lottie explained. “The branches here would be made of white gold, the central filigree coffee-brown enamel. With sculpting I could recreate a froth effect using something like a milky white chalcedony—”

“A what?” asked Tad.

“It’s a type of quartz,” explained Lottie. “And here, you see, at the center would sit a semiprecious stone like onyx or even a precious one like opal—something that’s dark and nutty, like a coffee bean. I could even work with organic material, say, use actual roasted coffee beans and experiment with lacquering and setting techniques to create complementary pieces.”

“May I see it?” I asked from behind the coffee bar.

Lottie was only too pleased to share her sketch.

“I’d buy this in a heartbeat,” I told her. “I can’t believe nobody’s done this before. When Joy was a little girl, Matt came back from Guatemala with a coffee-bean necklace for her. Down there, they’ve been making coffee-bean necklaces and bracelets from varnished roasted beans for years.”

“Interesting,” said Lottie. “So it’s a natural for any culture that embraces coffee.”

“Makes sense.” I handed Lottie back the sketch. “Which means you’ve got a worldwide market…and since specialty coffeehouses have been on the rise in America, I’d say this culture has never been more ripe for it.”

Rena Garcia tapped her chin in thought. She reached for the sketch and studied it. “You know, one of the accounts my boss managed was the Vardus line. Their stuff was cheap derivative crap compared to this, but it was my ideas for the campaign that boosted sales twenty-two percent in the first fiscal year. I could market something like this easily.”

Tad nodded. “Can’t say I know much about jewelry making, but this seems like a lucrative idea to me. Lottie, why in the world did you ever quit the fashion business in the first place?”

Lottie’s gaze broke from Tad’s. Her expression darkened. “There’s a lot of heartbreak that comes with success,” she said shortly. Then she forced that nervous, high-pitched laugh I’d heard her use the first day I’d met her. “I mean, look at Rena here. She boosted account sales and was fired anyway.”

At the time, I thought nothing of Lottie’s response. But looking back now, it seemed she’d deliberately turned the conversation back to Rena to avoid revealing what had happened in her past. I realized that I’d never heard her talk about her early years or the abrupt end to her career back then. Even when asked, she’d only want to talk about the present or the future.

That afternoon, Lottie had continued to sketch out an entire collection of possible variations on her “coffeehouse palette” theme—earrings, necklaces, bracelets, scarves, handbags. In the end, Rena never did make it to Satay and Satay to clean out her office. Instead, she helped Lottie Harmon map out a marketing strategy and come up with a catchy name for the line: Lottie Harmon’s Java Jewelry. And before that chance meeting had ended, Tad Benedict had agreed to put up a sizeable chunk of his own money to purchase raw materials and fund the crafting of prototypes based on Lottie’s designs.

Four months later—just in time for New York’s February Fashion Week—the Lottie Harmon brand name was re-born with an entire line of coffee-bean necklaces of black and brown gemstones, latte brooches, caramel-loop bracelets and rings, coffee-klatch clutches, cocoa-brown scarves dotted with “coffee-bean” beads, and dozens of other pieces.

The additional backing for Lottie’s launch came from the legendary clothing designer Fen, who had worked with Lottie through the seventies and early eighties and agreed to showcase her creations on his own models. The Lottie Harmon accessory line had been the buzz of that buying season with fall orders coming in from top retail: Harrods, Saks, Neiman Marcus, Printemps. The phenomenal sales transformed the moribund Lottie Harmon name into a multimillion dollar cash cow.

Fast forward seven months to the current Fashion Week festivities. Lottie, Tad, and Rena were all now very successful and very rich. Tad became a close friend and confidante to both women, and Lottie Harmon began to treat Rena Garcia like the daughter she never had—buying the younger woman expensive gifts, and even an apartment in the East Village.

For the current rollout, designer Fen had once again agreed to use Lottie’s jewelry designs. He would unveil his spring clothing line under the Bryant Park tents at the end of the week—which would mean a big boost for Lottie’s newest creations. Already, fashion buyers and top editors were writing about what Lottie might be “brewing up.” Everyone seemed to love the woman. She was one of the least catty and most generous people I’d met in my limited contact with the fashion world….

So why, I asked myself, would anyone want to poison Lottie’s latte?